Artist Index

30.9.18

Then and Now: Nuha Saad and Michele Beevors - opens Friday 5 October6-8pm

6 – 21 October 

Open 11am-5pm Friday - Sunday


This exhibition addresses the shifts in working methodologies over many years of encounters between two artists, Nuha Saad and Michele Beevors who met while sharing a studio at art college.

From left Nuha Saad, Untitled 2018 (work in progress-detail), acrylic on wood; 
Michele Beevors, Dustcatchers, 2018 ( work in progress-detail), wool

Nuha Saad works with the formal aspects of the space between painting and sculpture. Saad has been engaged for a long period of time with the decorative and the architectural. The work reinvigorates long overlooked spaces and displays an inherited sensibility which is influenced by both (post)colonial woodwork with its turned ornamentalism and a Lebanese/Australian heritage where counting, patterning, and colour have remained consistent themes These themes undermine the grim, muted and dour colour pallet of our colonial past and reinvigorate, playgrounds, public spaces and home furnishings in unique combinations of colour and shape which confront the viewer in surprising ways and overturn our expectations of the inherently bland urban architecture we expect in cities and in vogue living rooms, negotiating the difference between formalisms strict, this not that formula, and Minimalism's phenomenological encounter with a body in space.

Michele Beevors' practice has been interested in figuration as an encounter between feminism and commodity culture attempting a materialist critique in large scale sculptures in a series’ dedicated to disarm Disney Princesses, the typical Hollywood movie star and particular examples from art history, in which the female forms appear as armoured, abject and rampantly humorous in a riotous array of domestic materials and assorted cleaning products that also examines women’s labour in terms of the clean and tidy home and handcrafted traditions of knitting, and sewing. Informed by a pop sensibility, with a nod to the coming environmental crisis brought on by rampant global capitalism and its stockpiles of waste Beevors' work moves between figurative sculpture and the domestic abyss.

Michele Beevors 2018


About the artists:

Michele Beevors is an Australian artist and a Senior Lecturer at Dunedin School of Art in New Zealand. Beevors holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University, a Master of Visual Arts from The Australian National University, School of Art and a Bachelor of Visual Arts from City Art Institute. Beevors has exhibited in the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Europe.


Nuha Saad is a Sydney based sculptor working in the areas of installation, galleries and public art. Saad holds a Master of Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts and a Bachelor of Visual Arts from City Art Institute. Saad has exhibited extensively in both solo and group exhibitions in public, commercial and artist run galleries and her public artworks have been featured in public buildings and urban renewal projects, including large scale commissions for City of Sydney and Transport for NSW. http://nuhasaad.com/nuha-saad   https://www.instagram.com/nuhasaad1/